On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Doug Way wrote:

> > On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> >
> > > I've never got around to doing an enhancement that seems like a simple
> > > and useful idea. Somebody playing with UI stuff might like to try
> > > this:-
> > > In popup queries (like the one you get from a Browser whilst adding a
> > > new item in the protocol pane) it would be useful to have a popup
> > > menu of common options.

Georg Heeg's ApplicationManagment (for VW from UIUC-Archive) offers a
selection of all the protocols used in superclasses. 

What I especially like about the AppManBrowser are the little icons in the
message list indicating whether a method overrides/is overridden by
another method. The icon consists of two tiny triangles as arrow heads, an
up arrow meaning "it's already defined above", a down arrow "it's changed 
in some subclass".

> Speaking of browsers, I've been interested in the UI/layout aspects of
> code browsing for some time.... I was wondering if there are alternate
> browsers out there (for any Smalltalks or other OO languages) that use a
> significantly different layout than the tried & true browser with the
> separate class list/hierarchy pane, method list pane, and single method
> source pane. (plus variables pane, protocols pane, etc.)
> [...]
> The only thing that comes to mind is a Dylan language browser I saw once,
> which I seem to remember had a method list in which the source of the
> methods was expanded directly inside of the list.  This was great if you
> wanted to look at the source of a few methods simultaneously, if they
> happened to be near enough to each other in the list.  This was not so
> good with longer methods, though, plus dealing with a combination
> list/text widget can get pretty complicated.

Sounds like a Self inspector ... If you have access to a Sun
workstation, check it out. This should be fun in Morphic :-)

/bert

-- 
 Bert Freudenberg                                            Department of
                                                            Simulation and
 mailto:bert at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de                     Computer Graphics
 http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/bert.html        Univ. of Magdeburg